Suffocating goats for 'sustainable' fashion

Where to even start thinking about 'sustainability'

Definitely green. Except for the spiky parts.

Tl;dr - announcing 'Green Dreams', a new strand in the Rarely Certain newsletter. Coming (rather like the end of the world, apparently) as soon as tomorrow. But actually more likely tomorrow than the actual apocalypse. Look out for the new tab, up top and opt out of that section of Rarely Certain if you aren’t into the topic.

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Suffocating goats. They’ve haunted me for a few days now and that's it. I'm done. Even the nomenclature so beloved of advanced capitalism's latest shakedown is provoking a visceral disgust here. Because I dislike flattening, oversimplification and lying.

Say 'green', 'sustainable' and 'environmentally friendly' and you might as well be informing me that the slithy toves are gyring and gimbling as they are wont to do in the wabe. (Except that the words in Jabberwocky at least do correspond with genuine concepts, like movement, time and properties of things).

The 'Green Transition' is perhaps best understood as a form of soma, is where I'm landing. Something to dull the pain of reality for those who think they care. Something you can do your bit in helping to achieve. While all the usual machine capitalists milk the latest cash cow.

This new strand of Rarely Certain (there's a tab for it now - awaiting content) has been a long time coming. One reason is that I was formerly stuck in the polarity of it all. In that world of comforting certitude you take sides. You either accept the proposition that anthropogenic climate change is real, bad and must be addressed with whatever drastic measures will work - or you deny that anthropogenic climate change is a thing and insist that it's the measures to address this thing that isn't happening that are bad.

You pays your money and takes your choice. I was always signed up to the former proposition.

The other reason for hanging back is that perceptions are weird. You say one very specific thing and people think you're saying other things. Scale this up to the 'culture' and it becomes vaguely risky to express scepticism about things that are so emphatically embedded as acceptable precepts for right thinking people.

It's all about avoiding that frustrating cognitive tic that makes people assume that when you're sceptical over a claim that something bad is really the case, then you must support the bad thing.

Try getting someone to show you evidence for the thing they're outraged about and watch them assume that you're in favour of the thing they're outraged about. You aren't convinced? You're definitely on the other team then.